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TO THE MOON AND BACK
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The Human and Scientific Legacy of Project Diana

THEY ALSO SERVED

5/29/2017

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Like many others, I posted a photo of a man in uniform on my Facebook page today to commemorate Memorial Day, in this instance a cousin who died a few days after his 19th birthday at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, in a battle fought on perhaps the harshest terrain and under the worst weather conditions ever recorded in the annals of war. 

As I recounted his sad story and remembered the family’s grief (still vivid in my memory though I was only seven at the time), I started thinking about all those others who, though they may not have served in uniform, were also required to make heroic sacrifices. I thought of my cousin's parents, whose hopes and dreams for their son were shattered in that long-ago moment. And I thought of all those whose lives have been deflected by a call to arms, individuals without whose material and emotional support such missions, however heroic or futile, could not be carried out.

Of no war is this truer than of World War II, perhaps the last war in American history to have had almost universal public support. It was not only the Great War, it was also the Good War, a war in which we felt clearly aligned against the forces of evil. In his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw included within the scope of that term not only those who went off to fight on foreign soil but also those whose productivity at home made a decisive contribution to the war effort. It included not only my father-in-law, who spent most of the War as an Army Surgeon in Italy, but also his wife, left on her own to raise a child - my husband - who essentially never knew his father until he was four years old. It included my stepmother Rose, a true Rosie who put her career as a musician and a grade school teacher on hold to work as a welder at Grumman Aviation on Long Island. These were sacrifices made, and made willingly if not gladly, because Americans saw it as a collective commitment, not just a head count of troops sent by the President to fight and perhaps die in lands whose names they could barely pronounce. As Tom Brokaw put it, it was the “right thing to do.”

My father’s family is a case in point. It has often struck me as interesting and perhaps even a little odd that my father and his two younger brothers all served in somewhat unconventional capacities. 
  • My father, King Stodola, as anyone who follows this blog is aware, worked for the Army as a civilian scientist. There was never any question of his being sent overseas because his work in developing radar was considered essential to the war effort and in the event proved crucial to the Allied victory. 
  • Syd, the youngest of the Stodola brothers and the only one to don a uniform, served in the Coast Guard, the smallest by far of the four branches of the American military and a bit of a neglected stepchild despite a long tradition of keeping its big promise, Semper Paratus (“always ready”). “They don’t get half the credit they deserve,” said one man of his Dad’s Coast Guard career.
  • Quentin, the middle son, chose the most controversial path (even within his own family), registering as a Conscientious Objector - not a popular position especially during World War II, and even more especially for someone who was not a Quaker. 
   
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In recognition of Memorial Day, I decided to delve a little deeper into the contribution of these three young men to the war effort, and to invite their mother, Beatrice King Stodola, to help me out. Almost as though she were anticipating my queries, my grandmother was prescient enough to keep a journal entitled “Saint Barbara’s Hill: A Cape Cod War-time Log,” in which she documented her joys and (many!) anxieties, as well as the comings and goings of her “boys,” during her annual stay at Shining Sands, the family’s beloved vacation cottage, in the summer of 1943. (My poor grandfather, except for an occasional stolen weekend getaway and a longer stay later in the summer, remained sweltering at his office job in New York City - but that’s a story for another day.)  

I feel particularly blessed to have this journal because it gives me a glimpse of the adult relationship I might have had with my grandmother had she lived long enough. For example, on Thursday, August 5, she wrote, “My husband swims every day, but [I] must confess I only go in when I feel like it, which is not very often.” Friends, does that sound like me or what? I'd enjoy swimming so much more if only I didn't have to get wet! And again, a few days later, on Friday August 13:  “I had rather a disturbing letter from one of my sons [Quentin]. He may not bring his wife with him when he comes on furlough. It’s just too bad! Received a letter from the wife  of another son [King] with a picture of my grandchild – bless her. It was so nice to have daughters when my sons married.” As the mother of daughters, I feel exactly the same way, mutatis mutandis, about my two sons-in-law!
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Shining Sands, site of many happy memories from my own childhood.
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My grandmother, presiding on her porch (which by now had acquired a railing)..
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My grandfather standing by the door.
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Quentin, setting up a dive.
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A quiet moment with Syd.
The journal offers fascinating insights into life in the 1940’s in a country at war. My grandmother repeatedly refers to the nightly blackouts and notes her inability to get enough butter to make a blueberry pie. More chilling is the pervasive sense of fear and suspicion that permeates the journal, compounded by the inability to know exactly what’s going on: Is that apparently harmless shopkeeper an enemy agent in disguise? Is that man on the beach really just burning his garbage, or is he sending signals to the Enemy? Although these concerns may seem exaggerated, it is now known that German threats to coastal shipping were much more extensive than previously believed.

Despite her ongoing concern about German submarines and suspicious strangers, however, she seemed to be in greater danger from target practice conducted by the American military on the nearby dunes. The serenity of her vacation retreat was incessantly violated by the sound of the “ack-acks” in the (not-so-distant) distance - accounting for the title of her journal: “We shall have to change the name of this hill to Saint Barbara’s Hill. She’s the patron saint of gunners I am told.” During one of his weekend visits, my grandfather retreated several times one afternoon from the task of putting up screens on the second floor windows because the tracer bullets aimed at the target (towed by an airplane!) were just too close for comfort. 

But the most obvious impact on her family, of course, was the involvement of all three of her sons in the war effort. They are here “only in spirit, just now,” she notes. “‘Uncle Sam’ keeps them busy at the moment.” 

My father, working overtime at Camp Evans and spending what little spare time he had fulfilling his role as a new father, evidently never made it to the Cape at all that summer. My mother, however, kept the lines of communication open. On Thursday July 29, my grandmother wrote, “Pictures came today of our first grandchild [that would be me] – five months old.  We have all been wondering whom she looked like but these snap-shots certainly look as her dad, my oldest son, did when he was a baby.”

My Uncle Syd, a carefree bachelor, seems to have shown up whenever he had a few days’ leave. On Saturday July 24, she wrote, “About noon a telegram came from our Coast Guard son saying he would be in this afternoon between three and four – probably a forty-eight hour leave. He arrived on the four o-clock bus from Boston.  The rest of the day was spent in TALK and EATS.... After we pulled the black-out curtains we played three-handed bridge, in the midst of which the mother cat walked in proudly carrying a half-grown rabbit. The little thing seemed partly alive so the Coast Guard rescued it and put it out in the silver leaf." And then the next day, "We went out early this morning to see if the rabbit had escaped safely.  It had!  Somehow saving the life of a rabbit, and guns on the next hill, seems rather incongruous. …The Coast Guardsman left on the late bus very proud of his new stripe – he is now a seaman first class.” And again, on Sunday August 8: “We sat on the edge of the dune with [Syd] and watched groups of P.T. boats on the horizon…. [He] left at 7:30 with a package of cigarettes given him by the owner of the nearby village store. Those little things mean so much more to the boys than anyone realizes.” 

About my Uncle Quentin, whom I later came to know very well and whom I would describe as a perfect blend of severity and saintliness, I will leave the last word to my grandmother, who got it exactly right in her comments on Monday August 16: “[Quentin] is leaving this week-end to work for the Government in New Mexico. He has been at a C.P.S. [Civilian Public Service, which provided American Conscientious Objectors with an alternative to military service during World War II] camp in New Hampshire since shortly after the war began. I stand by all of my sons like the Rock of Gibraltar, whatever their beliefs. Who am I to say what is right or wrong when it comes to creed or religion? He has lost eighteen pounds being a human guinea pig in a diet experiment for the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory. They are trying to find the best food to send to the starving millions abroad. Last year he was a guinea pig for a louse experiment conducted at the camp by the Rockefeller Institute. In the last war thousands of boys lost their lives through disease spread by lice. The powders developed in this experiment came in time to be used by our boys in Africa.”
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"Getting our lousy underwear at the Lyceum." Basically the project involved wearing louse-infested underwear treated with DDT.
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​Quentin's granddaughter Sarah Wald and I have donated his collection of photos from his experience as a Conscientious Objector, of which this was one, to the Swarthmore College Peace Project.

On this Memorial Day, I’m proud of all the Stodola boys, for their courage in forging their destinies and for their signal contributions to the war effort. Each in his own way did work that saved countless lives. How many families are vouchsafed such a privilege?
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A VISIT TO THE EASTER BUNNY

4/17/2017

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Sherry, the younger of my two younger sisters, sent a “Happy Easter” message to our family yesterday, attaching a photo of herself, age 20 months, visiting the Easter Bunny. The look on her face is a perfect combination of bewilderment and fear, and her little left hand is completely drawn up into her sleeve. “The Easter Bunny may have eaten my hand; no wonder I look somewhat skeptical,” she captioned the photo. “Cindy and Leslie also have pics from this visit to the hutch,” she added.
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My sister Sherry, age 20 months, with the Easter Bunny.
She's right, I still have my own photo of that outing, taken in the Spring of 1950, shortly after I turned seven. A few years ago I posted it on Facebook on Easter Day, and one of my friends observed that the Easter Bunny looked a little creepy. I can no longer look at the photo without thinking of that comment, and Sherry's “missing hand” photo only serves to increase the vague sense of uneasiness the images evoke. My brother, who missed the Easter Bunny photoshoot for the excellent reason that he hadn’t yet been born, opined that the registration number (visible on both photos) just adds to the creep-factor. (Fortunately for our tender little psyches, I don't think any of us ever believed in the Easter Bunny with quite the same uncritical fervor as we did in Santa Claus.)
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My turn.
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If Leslie’s photo turns up, I’ll update this blog entry and complete the series.
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Bunnyland, as I recall, was located in Steinbach’s, which at that time billed itself as “the world’s largest resort department store.” The Asbury Park Steinbach’s, founded in the late 19th century, was the flagship store of what eventually became a chain, with branches dotting the Jersey shore. The store later fell on hard times after racial tensions flared in Asbury Park and was permanently shuttered in 1979, but when I lived there Steinbach’s was in its heyday. The trapezoidal “flatiron” style building that I recall, on Cookman Ave - a real eye-grabber - had been built in the 1930’s with four floors and a basement; by the time I arrived on the scene, a fifth floor and a clock tower had been added. ​
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Steinbach department store in downtown Asbury Park, New Jersey, as it appeared at the time of its closure in 1979.
I actually found Steinbach’s a little intimidating, with its multiple floors of merchandise and elevators run by uniformed attendants, and I don’t recall ever going there alone. I was more comfortable in the “five-and-dime” variety stores like Woolworth’s (sort of like what are now, what with inflation, called “dollar stores”), with at most two floors, connected by moving staircases that offered the illicit thrill of reaching the second floor by running very fast up the down escalator. But when my mother wanted to go a little more upscale - to buy her lingerie, for example - she went to Steinbach’s. And since Steinbach's had the only Easter Bunny in town, that's where she took her three young daughters to pose with the big guy with the floppy ears (the cute photos - available for purchase, of course - being the main object of the encounter, since wish lists and naughty-or-nice issues weren't part of the Easter narrative).
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Even for those of us who weren't particularly religious, Easter was a wonderful, happy holiday that signaled the arrival of Spring - a time of rebirth, a time when we could don our fanciest finery without freezing our bare legs, a time when we could start dreaming about summer vacation, about hunting for lady slippers and catching box turtles.

It also brought out our latent artistic impulses. When it came to the dyeing and decorating of eggs, families aligned themselves in two camps, those who hard-boiled their eggs and a smaller faction that hollowed them out. We were in the latter camp (and for that reason I still have eggs decorated by my daughters when they were children). We punctured both ends of the eggs and then blew on one end, somehow avoiding the twin hazards of salmonella from placing our lips on the raw eggs and apoplexy from the eye-popping effort required to blow the entire contents of an egg through that minuscule opening. (Trust me, this is no easy task, especially if you want the holes to remain small and inconspicuous. I usually ended up cheating and making the pinholes a little larger. It also helps to break up the yolk with your pin.)


The night before Easter, my mother filled our baskets (each of us had her own, recycled and restocked year after year) with Easter grass, the eggs we’d decorated, and a mouthwatering assortment of chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, and gumdrops. (No peeps - those weren’t mass produced till 1953.) My own favorites were those large crystallized sugar eggs with windows looking into a miniature alternative universe - not because of the sugar (though that was delicious when the confection finally dried out and crumbled) but because I liked to fantasize about crossing through that window into my own little Wonderland. You can still buy these eggs but somehow the interior landscape doesn't seem nearly as elaborate or compelling. Or maybe it's I who have changed.

After the baskets were assembled, my mother hid them, and the next morning we had to search for them. And by "hid them" I mean she really hid them, and never in easy, obvious places. One year she hid Sherry's basket in a seldom-used closet and swarms of ants found their way to the candy, so Leslie and I had to share our goodies with our little sister. Life’s like that sometimes. 


Later in the day, having already stuffed ourselves with candy, we gorged on ham with pineapple slices studded with cloves, or perhaps on roast lamb with green mint jelly - both typical Easter fare of the era. Only Thanksgiving was a more tradition-laden dinner. For our friends who gave up something they cherished for Lent, the Easter feast ended forty days of deprivation. We enjoyed the goodies without the deprivation. Life’s like that sometimes, too.
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TORA, TORA, TORA?

4/5/2017

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A few weeks ago, in a post describing my father’s work on detecting incoming kamikaze attacks, I mentioned that his earlier work on the Army radar that had successfully detected Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor was probably the basis for his assignment to find a way to prevent Japanese planes from flying “under the radar.” This offhand remark generated a flurry of comments and questions. One friend wrote: “WAIT!  You’re saying your dad…knew planes were coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor???…. That is a breath-taking piece of information, Cindy.” 

​Although I went back and added a link to the original entry in support of this observation, it is such a quintessential Camp Evans story that I decided it was worth a post of its own.

First, lest I left any room for confusion: No, my father had no idea that planes were coming in to bomb Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, as he later stated unequivocally in my oral history interview with him. In fact, there is no reason why he should have known. He was still a newbie at Camp Evans, less than a year on the job. His task was to optimize the equipment then in use, the SCR270, and work on the next step in the series, the SCR271, planned for installation at Pearl Harbor but not yet built.  

In the hours during and after the attack, the only ones likely to be privy to information about what had or hadn’t been detected were the members of a select, top secret group that had been working at Camp Evans for years to prevent surprise air attacks on critical vulnerable targets including not only Pearl Harbor but also the Marshall Islands, Midway, the Philippines, the Panama Canal, and others. Needless to say, these men held positions well above my father’s pay grade.
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The SCR270B was a portable unit that could be carried in four trucks. The antenna, a steel tower folded over on itself with nine bays clamped onto it, stood at 50 feet when deployed.
What actually happened in Hawaii that fateful morning is a classic example of an advanced new technology getting out ahead of its end users. Privates Joseph L. Lockard, age 19, and George E. Elliott, in his early twenties, reported for duty at 4am at the Opana Mobile Radar Station, located 230 feet above sea level on the northern tip of Oahu. Although they were supposed to work in three-man teams, only the two men were on duty - Lockard serving as Operator and Elliott as both Plotter and Motorman.

It was an unusually quiet morning, and Lockard took advantage of the lull to train Elliott in the use of the SCR270B. At 7am, the end of their shift, Lockard began shutting down the unit, when suddenly the oscilloscope picked up an image on the 5" screen so surprising he first thought something was wrong - a blip so large it must have been at least 50 planes. As of 7:02am, the blip appeared 132 miles from Oahu. Elliott suggested they report this reading to the Information Center at Fort Shafter, around 30 miles south of the Opana Station. Lockard hesitated at first, but after several minutes of conversation - during which the blip moved another 25 miles closer to Oahu - he gave Elliott the go-ahead.
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Joe Lockard on duty at the Opana Mobile Radar Station.
At the Information Center, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, Pursuit Officer and Assistant to the Controller, was on duty that day, and except for the Switchboard Operator, he was alone. The Switchboard Operator took down Elliott's message - then, realizing that Tyler was still in the building, turned the call over to him. 

Tyler's job description was "to assist the Controller in ordering planes to intercept enemy planes...." This was his second time serving in that capacity, the first having taken place three days earlier; he had no training in radar. The Controller and the Aircraft Identification Officer were out of the building having breakfast. Dismissing out of hand the possibility that the blip could actually be incoming enemy aircraft, Tyler scoured his mind for alternative explanations, then remembered that a squadron of B57 bombers - "Flying Fortresses" - was expected from the mainland that morning. With a sigh of relief he uttered five words that haunted him for the rest of his life: "Well, don't worry about it."

By now it was 7:20am. The planes were 74 miles away.


The first bombs struck Pearl Harbor at 7:55am, and only then did the three men realize what it was they had seen on the radar screen. Had the information been passed along, even with only a little over half an hour's lead time, American aircraft might have been dispersed and ammunition readied. Had the Navy been notified, it might have used the information to help locate the Japanese aircraft carriers from which the invading planes took off. Although it is unlikely the main thrust of the attack could have been averted, a response, any response at all, might have demoralized the Japanese by undermining their supreme confidence that they had achieved "tora," a surprise attack - a goal they saw as crucial to their success.

In subsequent inquiries, Tyler was exonerated due to his lack of training and experience. Lockard received the lion's share of the credit and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1942. Elliott was given the Legion of Merit but declined because he felt, with some justice, that he should not be given a lesser medal than Lockard.

Meanwhile, back at Camp Evans, thousands of miles to the east, members of the team charged with preventing surprise attacks waited on tenterhooks when they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, fearing their radar had failed. “If our radar had not given warning because of breakdown, or just ineffectiveness," said First Lieutenant Harold Zahl, "surely part of the finger of blame would point at our group.” He himself had designed and hand-made special tubes for the radar set; had one of them failed? Not until several days later did they receive a call from Washington reassuring them that human error and not equipment failure had been responsible. 

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Although no one knew exactly when or where an enemy strike might occur, the Navy had developed and emplaced ship-based radar units as early as 1940, and by early 1941 the Army team at Camp Evans had set up land-based radar systems in potential target areas around the world. In addition to the Opana station, four other radar units had been installed in Hawaii. This is no secret.
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Moreover, the story of the radar signals received by Lockard and Elliott but misinterpreted by Tyler and then ignored altogether is hardly an obscure anecdote buried in tomes read only by military historians or on websites visited only by passionate World War II buffs. On the contrary, it has been retold countless times in popular books and movies over the years. Notable among them: a brief, readable account entitled A Day of Infamy written by Walter Lord and published in 1957 (60th anniversary edition issued in 2001), in which a riveting description of the events that unfolded in the hour before the attack appears; a
 Japanese-American full-length dramatization of the events of that day entitled Tora! Tora! Tora!, which garnered an audience score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes; and a 1981 New York Times bestseller entitled At Dawn We Slept, the first volume of a massive trilogy by a history professor named Gordon W. Prange, who devoted not years but decades to the study of a single day in history, generating thousands of typewritten pages of text that after his death were valiantly edited by two assistants-coauthors. (Lockard and Elliott make their first appearance 500 pages into the book.) The story even appears in wikipedia. 

So why is it that so many of us still cling to the myth that the US was totally unprepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Perhaps because the Japanese version of the story - that the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise to the Americans - is the one that captured the world’s imagination. Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the first wave of Japanese fighters, famously sent the message “Tora, tora, tora!” to his superiors waiting on the aircraft carrier Akagi - making the communication (intentionally) puzzling to the casual listener since the word tora means "tiger" in Japanese. But “tora” was also a radio codeword combining the two Japanese words totsugeki and raigeki, a phrase meaning "lightning attack”; to those in the know, “Tora, tora, tora” had nothing to do with big cats and everything to do with having delivered a bolt from the blue. And why shouldn’t the Japanese have believed this? After all, from their point of view there was no indication that anyone had the slightest inkling that an attack was underway. No defense was mounted, no evasive action was taken, thereby allowing the Japanese to punch above their weight at Pearl Harbor.


Or perhaps it’s because we collectively prefer the metaphor of the sleeping giant awakened to the less heroic conclusion that three undertrained, inexperienced men had been entrusted with a new technology, and that but for human error, the encounter might have taken a somewhat different turn.

What is lost in the myth-making process is perhaps a minor footnote to the overall arc of the Pearl Harbor narrative but an important chapter in the history of radar. It was the first wartime use of radar by the US military, and, despite the series of mishaps that rendered it useless at Pearl Harbor, it was abundantly clear that this revolutionary new technology was poised to transform the way war was waged. Being neither a military historian nor a radar scientist, I will leave a fuller investigation and interpretation of these developments to someone more qualified than I.
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TONI's DOUBLE LIFE

3/12/2017

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Of all my childhood toys, only two remain with me today: my Hazel-Atlas “modern tone” tea set (supplemented by eBay purchases to replace pieces that went missing somewhere along the way) and my beloved Toni doll.

​My Toni is a model P90 - that is, 14” tall (the smallest Toni; the dolls also came in several larger sizes.) She has blue sleep-eyes lined with a fringe of upper lashes and painted lower lashes, a slightly pouty red mouth, a jointed body, and a platinum wig glued to her skull. Sadly, one of her hard plastic pinkies has broken off, but she is otherwise in pretty good shape. She was manufactured by the Ideal Toy Company sometime between 1949 and 1953, so I couldn’t have been more than ten when she and I began our long journey together, and more likely closer to six. I suppose I should display her on a stand and try to protect her from further damage, but my granddaughter loves to play with her and I love watching my granddaughter at play, so Toni’s fate is to lead the rough-and-tumble life of a child’s toy and not the pampered retirement of a collectible gathering dust on a shelf.

In addition to Toni herself, I have a whole wardrobe of clothes made by my mother using patterns from Butterick or McCall’s and material left over from clothes she made for us on her trusty old Kenmore electric home sewing machine (which I also still have, along with a set of bobbins and a box of lethal-looking attachments for ruffling, zigzagging, buttonholing, etc.). In fact, for a long time I had two of each outfit, one for Toni and one for her red-haired sister Nancy Lee, a slightly larger Arranbee doll with which I foolishly parted with when her arms and legs came off, not knowing at the time how easy it would have been for any “doll doctor” to reattach them. I no longer have Toni's original outfit, detracting from any value she might retain as a collectible, but the ones my mother made for me are far more precious.
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Toni looking jaunty in a jumpsuit made by my mom.
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As gifts to my sisters, I repurposed a couple of duplicate doll dresses into cushions.
Although to the untutored eye she resembles many dolls of her era, including my poor dismembered and discarded Nancy Lee, my Toni doll has a dirty little secret: In addition to being a charming toy with lots of little-girl appeal, she was also a promotional gimmick for Toni Home Permanents. Designed by the renowned German immigrant doll sculptor Bernard Lipfert, she came packaged with her own home permanent kit that included a sugar-water permanent solution, end papers, curlers, and a comb. Yes, you could actually perm Toni's nylon wig - though if you did it too often her hair could turn into an irrecoverably sticky mess.

In the past women had styled their hair with curling irons and, well, just plain irons, which all too often left their homes reeking of scorched hair. So the development of the permanent wave in the early twentieth century was embraced by many women, especially after the less elaborate cold wave was invented in 1938. But even though the alarming Rube Goldberg machines and strong heat of the old-style perms were no longer needed, the cold wave process still involved serious chemical changes to the protein structure of the hair and required six to eight hours in a salon.

​The home permanent, pioneered by the Toni Home Permanent Company of Forest Lake, Minnesota, was thus a breakthrough product, offering a cheaper alternative to the salon perm and bringing hair styling back home again. It also made beauty a social occasion, with Toni parties becoming popular among both teenagers and adults.
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In 1948, the Toni Company was acquired by Gillette, an early step towards diversification for Gillette and also the start of more aggressive marketing of Toni products. The best-known ad campaign featured photographs of wavy-haired identical twins and famously asked, "Which Twin has the Toni?" The twins themselves sometimes appeared in touring shows that invited audience participation in making the correct identification.

Less attention has been paid by historians of advertising to the innovative process by which the Toni doll's creators sought to engage the consumer by appealing to her children. I was blissfully unaware not only of being targeted by the advertising industry but also of the delicious irony of having wheedled my mother into paying for this privilege.

Long hair and heavy machinery don't mix, and the employment of women in factories during World War II led to a call for shorter hairstyles. (The sultry actress Veronica Lake cut off her  "peekaboo" locks to help promote workplace safety, and although her career suffered as a result, her sacrifice led to a measurable decline in industrial accidents.) The home perm was well adapted to these new styles and helped prolong a preference for soft waves or curls, often swept away from the face or paired with bangs.

Sleeker straighter hairstyles did not become fashionable till the 1960s, popularized by activists like Joan Baez, and my poor sister, who had the most adorable straight hair and bangs, was subjected in the name of beauty to a series of Tonettes, a Toni home perm intended especially for little girls. My own hair, on the other hand, was too curly. I desperately wanted to let it grow long, but my soft-hearted mother couldn’t bear the anguished tears produced by combing out my sausage curls and repeatedly dragged me off to a beauty parlor for a cringe-worthy do called the “cap cut.” 
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My little sister with her Tonette curls.
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The dreaded "cap cut."
I'm not sure when creme rinse - a thin white liquid that magically softened and detangled thick curly hair - became readily available, but when it did it changed my life. (It now seems to have morphed into much thicker “conditioners” that moisturize, volumize, and decrease frizz. Sorry, folks, it's not the same stuff.) Once I discovered creme rinse, I let my hair grow out and didn’t trim it back to shoulder-length until I turned forty.
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Defeating the "divine wind"

2/25/2017

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In 1274 AD and again seven years later, Mongol fleets led by Kublai Khan launched major attacks on Japan. On both occasions, according to legend, massive typhoons destroyed the vessels and foiled the invasions. The Japanese believed these storms had been sent by the gods to protect them from conquest and called them the “divine wind.”

Or in Japanese, “kamikaze.”

In the waning days of World War II, when Japan’s defeat was all but inevitable but surrender was unacceptable, Emperor Hirohito “asked” Japanese pilots to become kamikazes, divine winds once again defending the homeland by deliberately crashing into Allied warships. Preference for death over defeat or capture was deeply embedded in the Japanese military culture, as was the tradition of absolute loyalty to the Emperor, the gods' representative on earth. The number of volunteers exceeded available aircraft, and extra men were sometimes sent to accompany the official pilot, perhaps to provide moral support. 

Some kamikaze aircraft were fashioned from existing planes, others were purpose-built - most notoriously the MXY-7 "Ohka", which was actually designed to kill its pilot. (Although the Americans sometimes dismissed these pilot-guided missiles as “baka” bombs - a Japanese pejorative roughly meaning “stupid” - it would probably be more accurate to describe them as the original “smart bombs.”)  The first kamikaze mission struck in late October of 1944. In the end, nearly 4,000 kamikaze pilots died and more than 300 managed to hit a ship. Reportedly, more than 70 US vessels - aircraft carriers were a favored target - were sunk or damaged beyond repair.
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USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa (photo above) and Lieutenant Junior Grade Seizō Yasunori on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing and 264 wounded from a crew of 2,600.By U.S. Navy; The original uploader was Quercusrobur at English Wikipedia.
Most soldiers go into battle understanding they may be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice. As we know from even more recent history, however, deliberate suicide attacks present special challenges since no exit plan is required. Kamikaze pilots were instructed to fly low over the water and to keep the mountains at their backs. This enabled them to evade Allied radar, which aimed its beams away from the ground to avoid signals from non-moving objects at a fixed distance from the antenna - producing "clutter" on the display that made detection of moving targets more difficult. Essentially, the Japanese military had found a radar blind spot they could exploit, for example, through suicide missions that could remain "under the radar" until they self-destructed.

Urgent appeals were made to the radar laboratories of the Army, the Navy, Bell Laboratories, and MIT to find a way to eliminate the blind spot. At the time, my father was head of the Special Developments Group, which had produced many radar improvements including the Army's first operational moving target radar. Based on his earlier work on the Army radar series, the SCR 270/271, which had successfully detected Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor in 1941 (information that was unfortunately discounted by the commanding officer on duty), he was assigned to lead a team of experts in responding to the call for improved detection of moving targets low on the horizon by filtering out background clutter.

To accomplish this goal, within the context of very limited time and budget, the team made major modifications to the SCR-270 to stabilize emissions and improve detection of small frequency shifts (Doppler modulation effects). 
The large return signals produced by stationary objects (i.e., background clutter) were then processed using small time constants, resulting in rapid decay on the radar screen, while the smaller Doppler-modulation signals were processed using longer time constants to obtain greater persistence of the moving target on the screen, producing a distinctive "writhing" pattern that could be readily perceived by the human eye.

These modifications were carried out onsite by available government personnel - no time to job it out! - and then field-tested both in a mountainous region near Ellenville, NY and on Navy landing craft. The updated equipment performed beautifully. Gone was the blind spot; kamikaze pilots could no longer fly under the radar.

Less than a year later, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima; on August 9, another was dropped on Nagasaki. The calculus that went into this decision - the number of Allied lives presumably saved by ending the War sooner rather than later, and whether the same goal might have been achieved without targeting large civilian populations - will undoubtedly be debated as long as it is remembered. In any event, the Japanese surrender was announced less than a week later, and the official documents were signed on September 2, 1945. For many historians, however, the verdict remains that although the A-bomb may have ended the War, it was radar that won the War.

My father later wrote that this "earlier work on moving target detection had prepared us well for [Project Diana]." And indeed, the approach he and his team brought to the task of making kamikaze flights visible - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test - foreshadowed his approach to bouncing radar waves off a very large target moving through space and, in little, to household repairs, where clever jury-rigging was elevated to a fine art.
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My Dad, E. King Stodola, at around the time of the work described in this essay.
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IN CELEBRATION OF DIANA DAY

1/10/2017

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Seventy-one years ago today, on January 10, 1946, a small band of men gathered in the northeast corner of Camp Evans, aimed their heavily modified SCR-271 “bedspring” antenna at the rising moon, and broadcast a series of radar signals. Two and a half seconds after each signal - the length of time it takes light to travel to the moon and back - an echoing signal was received. Project Diana had shown that the ionosphere could be pierced by radio waves, marking the birth of radioastronomy and the opening of the space age. Click here for a contemporary newsreel about the event and the excitement it generated.
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The "bedspring" mast antenna used to bounce radar waves off the Moon. Two antennas from SCR-271 stationary radars mounted on a 30M tower were positioned side by side to form a 32-dipole array. (U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Museum, Ft Monmouth, NJ)
Today also marks a more modest milestone, the first anniversary of this blog. In recognition of these two events, I'm devoting today’s post to a few comments on the historic, scientific, and sociocultural significance of Project Diana. My list is by no means exhaustive, and additions and corrections are welcome.

MILITARY USES
In a very real sense, Project Diana was the opening salvo in the Cold War. Concerned that the Soviets had captured enough German expertise to build missiles capable of reaching the US, the Pentagon ordered Jack DeWitt, head of the Evans Lab, to develop radar systems capable of detecting and tracking such missiles. DeWitt interpreted his mandate broadly. Since there were in fact no such missiles in existence on which to perform such a test, he found in this directive the perfect excuse for pursuing his decades-old dream of “shooting the Moon.” “Well, if we could hit the moon with radar,” he argued, “we could probably detect the rockets.” With almost anyone else at the helm of Camp Evans, the project might have taken a different and probably less informative turn. Indeed, the successful moon shot appears to have taken DeWitt’s  superiors by surprise, and two weeks of checking and replicating elapsed before the War Department allowed the achievement to be announced to the world. 

Although radar had proved highly effective in detecting enemy ships and aircraft during World War II, many doubted that radio waves could penetrate the ionosphere, bounce off a target, and be detected back on Earth. Project Diana served notice that anything the USSR wanted to throw at us, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, could be detected and tracked as well. Development of weapons to intercept such missiles followed; the arms race and the quest for mutually assured destruction was underway.

SCIENTIFIC IMPLICATIONS
Robert Buderi, in his book The Invention that Changed the World, about the central role of the MIT Rad Lab in the development of radar (for which the Signal Corps’ coup in bouncing radar waves off the moon constituted a bit of an inconvenient truth), dismisses the achievement as little more than a clever demonstration: “The hullabaloo soon died down. For all its remarkability as an engineering feat, the DeWitt experiment held next to nothing of scientific interest.” 

Is this really so? True, Project Diana was not an experiment or discovery in the same sense as was, say, unraveling the mystery of DNA. Still, it provided conclusive nonsupport for the going hypothesis that the ionosphere could not be penetrated by radar, and by doing so it lifted a veil in the field of astronomy. For most of human history our knowledge of the universe was based solely on the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Adding the radio band to our toolbox extended our observational capabilities tenfold. It also enabled not only passive observation of but also active communication with the universe beyond.

Once the War Department conceded that Project Diana had really accomplished what Jack DeWitt claimed, it was quick to grasp the potential of moon bounce technology. Among its predictions: accurate topographical mapping of heavenly bodies, measurement and analysis of the ionosphere, and radio control of space travel, missiles, and orbiting artificial satellites. The news media also chimed in, with Time suggesting that Project Diana might provide a test of Einstein’s theory of relativity, while a more skeptical Newsweek article labeled the War Department’s predictions “worthy of Jules Verne.” As a NASA historian concluded years later, “all of the predictions made by the War Department, including the relativity test, have come true in the manner of a Jules Verne novel."

ADVANCES IN COMMUNICATION
Project Diana touches our lives every time we pull out our cell phones, the most ubiquitous example of satellite communications. Personal mobile communications devices have changed our lives and our expectations in ways ranging from how we deal with emergencies to the level of "sharing" we now expect from each other. (How many stories have you read and movies have you watched turning on plot twists that would not be possible had the protagonists had cell phones?) In many parts of the developing world cell phone technology is the open sesame to global participation. It does not replace land lines, it replaces nothing. It is all there ever was.

Project Diana is also the locus classicus for Earth-Moon-Earth communication, whereby amateur radio operators interact with other hams around the world by bouncing radio signals off the moon. My father and his team hoped to receive echoes from their own transmissions, whereas EME enthusiasts are more interested in sending out signals and having them received elsewhere on earth. But the technology is conceptually identical, and presumably so is the joy experienced by my father in being able to use the moon as a relay station for radio signals.


HELPING TO SHAPE THE AMERICAN MYTH
Would the advances described above have happened without Project Diana? In some form, almost certainly yes. Several other labs were poised to mount similar demonstrations, and within a month of Project Diana’s spectacular triumph, Zoltan Bay of Hungary, adopting a different approach from that used by the Camp Evans team, also successfully “shot the moon.” 

But Bay was second, and Project Diana was first, a fact that had a profound impact on the American psyche. Coming as it did on the heels of America’s contribution to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, based on our “can do” spirit and technological expertise, it was so to speak the frosting on the cake, suggesting a host of peaceful as well as military applications for our capabilities. Since previous moon bounce efforts (including our own) had failed, and since many reputable scientists believed the ionosphere could not be penetrated by radio waves, Project Diana burnished our self-image as a people who could do the impossible. Because the team basically improvised using materials already on hand, it reinforced our faith in our talent as engineers and tinkerers. Finally, it provided a cultural template for subsequent American space exploration, initiating the tradition of naming such projects after ancient Greek and Roman gods like Mercury and Apollo and glorifying (in the person of Jack DeWitt) the cowboy hero with the “right stuff” later exemplified by American astronauts.

Every country creates a mythology about itself that helps to form its national identity and make its people feel as though they are part of something larger than themselves. What aligns with the mythology is selected; what doesn't tends to be winnowed out. The postwar years were a time when America was starting to flex its muscles on a global scale, and its sense of itself was rapidly evolving to accommodate these developments. Project Diana was perfectly poised to be part of this process. For a variety of reasons, it is not so easy these days to feel exceptional on the global stage, which is probably why so many Americans harbor nostalgia for what in retrospect seem to have been simpler, better times.
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JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

12/31/2016

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In the spirit of tidying up 2016’s loose ends in time for the New Year, I have a couple of follow-ups to earlier posts based on reader responses. Rather than updating old entries and expecting my long-suffering readers to go back and dredge them up, I decided to do a free-standing post elaborating on a couple of interesting bits of mid-20th century Americana.

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​First, in the essay entitled “Out and About on the Jersey Shore,” dated May 3, 2016, I stated “Our friends the Evers had [a car with a rumble seat, a padded bench where the trunk should have been], and we all vied to be one of the two lucky ducks (three, if we wheedled persuasively enough) who got to ride there…. (The Evers family also had a Willy’s Jeep. They had all the good cars!)”


Picture(Courtesy of the Evers family)
When I recently asked Helen and Bill Evers for some photos of their mother for my essay on Pearl Harbor, Helen sent several of their childhood family, including a couple of pictures of the cars I had mentioned in the May 3 post. This one is almost certainly the car with the rumble seat, though that particular feature is hidden by the Evers paterfamilias, Jim.

The other car photo she sent was of the Willy's jeep! Just seeing that iconic car and those two adorable little kids brought a smile to my face.
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Bill and Barbara Evers, shown with their family's Willy's Jeep in 1949. (Courtesy of the Evers family)
We Americans loved our Willy’s Jeeps. Brainchild of the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, the Willy’s Jeep Station Wagon first rolled off the assembly line in 1946, just in time to join American families in their wholesale move to the suburbs. I was pleased to confirm my childhood memory: Despite its appearance, it was actually a faux woody made of painted steel, a design that was both safer and better-suited to mass-production than contemporary wood-bodied passenger wagons. Production continued in the US until 1965, when the Jeep Wagoneer supplanted it in our fickle affections. Production continued in Brazil and Argentina for several more years.

Thanks, Helen and Bill, for your generosity in sharing these wonderful old family photos. (I always have a hard time using the term "vintage" about photos of my own contemporaries!)

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Second, my daughter Julie, upon reading my most recent entry, “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” dated December 25, 2016, asked me if my mother’s legs were really bare in the home movie clip of her sledding down the driveway with me. “Those weren't white wool stockings?” The same comment could equally well be applied to the women’s legs in the photo of the riverside bonfire.

A little clarification is in order. No, I don't remember my mother's ever owning or wearing white wool stockings. But I probably shouldn’t have used the term “bare-legged” (even though to my way of thinking it’s a distinction without a difference) because she was almost certainly wearing nylon stockings - and therein lies a story.


Nylon was developed in the 1930s in the lab of Wallace Carothers, a polymer scientist with Dupont, and patented in 1938.  Although Dupont’s vision for their invention - the world’s first fully synthetic fiber - extended far beyond hosiery, they cannily decided to start by offering women an affordable and less delicate alternative to silk stockings. The new product was introduced with much hoopla at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and went on sale to the general public in May of 1940. Four million pairs were sold on the first day alone. Nylon became a household word and “nylons” a synonym for stockings. They were more than just an article of women’s underwear, they offered hope that modern technology would lift a Depression-weary nation into prosperity once again.

Barely had nylons become one of life’s necessities for the American woman when they were snatched away. In December of 1941 the US entered World War II, and all nylon was diverted to the War effort, used for everything from parachutes to rope to aircraft fuel tanks. The only stockings to be had were bought either before the War or on the black market. To give the illusion they were wearing proper nylons, women painted “seams” down the backs of their legs (probably straighter than it was ever possible to get the real thing!). When stockings were reintroduced after the War, consumer demand outstripped supply, leading to mile-long queues and even “nylon riots,” with women getting into fist fights with one another in the heat of competition. Fortunately Dupont soon rose to the occasion and ramped up production of the coveted garment.

Late in the 1940s seamless nylons became available, but surprisingly they never entirely caught on. (For some, apparently the seams were part of the mystique.) Nylons, with or without seams, along with the garter belts that held them up, remained women’s wardrobe mainstays until the introduction of pantyhose in 1959 - ushering in a trend towards higher hemlines and ultimately the micro-miniskirts that shocked us all a few years later. But that is another story.

I should add that little girls did not wear nylons until they reached their teens or at least their tween years. In the firehouse Christmas party photo, the girls truly were bare-legged, though we usually wore leggings when we went outside during the winter. By leggings I don’t mean either the modified tights that are now called leggings or the leg-warmers worn by dancers and dancer wannabes, I’m talking about thick wooly pants held up with suspenders that were companion garments to winter coats. These leggings were only worn outside, so we put them on and took them off again multiple times per day - going to and from school, for recess, at lunchtime, etc. Synthetics had not yet revolutionized cold-weather gear, at least not for civilians, and we spent much of our outdoor recreation time looking and feeling like the Pillsbury Doughboy - unlike our moms, who simply had to grin and bear it.

Thanks, Julie, for asking a good question and for caring about how cold your grandmother must have been!
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A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

12/24/2016

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When I thought of writing about “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” I realized I’d actually done it several years ago, when my grandson, then age 8, was collecting family history narratives from all his grandparents for his Cub Scout Bear Trail badge. One of the questions was, “What did you do as a child during the holidays?”

​My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.

Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince]. 
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​Once we recovered from the soporific effects of the feast, my grandfather, a concert pianist whose skills had sadly grown rusty from arthritis and disuse, reluctantly succumbed to my grandmother's pleas and sat down at the piano, his ever-present cigar dangling from his lips, and we all sang Christmas carols. Then my sisters and I, having raided our grandmother’s wonderful costume trunk full of scarves and bolts of exotic material, belted out all five verses of "We Three Kings.” I always claimed the role of Balthazar because I loved the dark melodrama of his lines: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in a stone-cold tomb." (Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, also about the gifts of the Magi, was written and first shown on TV in the early 1950's. My sisters and I took to it instantly, probably because we were already devoted fans of the three wise men and felt we had a special connection with them. We spent many happy hours reenacting the songs from Amahl - and thus a new holiday tradition was born.) 

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas season began in earnest. My mother made two fruitcakes, one dark and one light - the locus classicus for my own compulsion to bake fruitcake every year whether anyone likes it or not - which she doused liberally with brandy once a week until Christmas. Around the same time, my father scheduled the family Christmas card photoshoot, a ritual he truly adored. He set up lots of spotlights, and some years he also draped the room with sheets to provide a neutral backdrop. Elaborate scenarios were developed (clutching our pets; reading to the younger children; my sister at an easel pretending to paint), and a primitive version of Photoshop was applied to the results. His children didn’t always share his enthusiasm (as unfortunately can be seen from our glum expressions in some of the photos - re-do's weren't as easy as with an iPhone!). We had to sit very still, with our pasted-on smiles, and the spotlights made the room hot as an oven. Today, of course, I am inordinately grateful not only for the memories my father made for all of us by staging this event but also for the photographic record of how we all grew and changed and added to our number over the years. Wish I could tell him so now. 
The cards began in 1943, when I was 10 months old. There was no card for 1944. After that the series remained unbroken; some years there were actually two different versions. The only year my parents appeared was 1950. Note the extra-special gift we received in 1953! Our last Christmas in Neptune was 1955; the cards continued for a few more years at our new home on Long Island. 

​A couple of weeks before The Day, we decorated the house. My mother had a creche that we set up on the mantle, and even though we weren't particularly religious, I loved the baby Jesus and the whole family tableau. (I still do.) Right below them hung the stockings awaiting Santa's attention - an interesting juxtaposition of Christian and pagan symbolism, though not one we thought much about at the time. We also had a little cardboard village with colored cellophane windows and holes for Christmas lights, which she arranged on the piano. A wreath went up on the door.

​My father set up the tree in a semi-finished "game room" in the basement, near the pingpong table. The beloved box of ornaments came down from the attic, and we competed to be allowed to hang our favorites. Another predictable squabble was sparked by the silver foil icicles: I liked to hang them slowly and painstakingly so they would look like real icicles, while my sister preferred taking clumps of the stuff and flinging them at the tree. These mini-crises resolved, we artfully arranged our gifts under the tree - all but the ones from Santa, who didn't visit till Christmas Eve after all of us (including, we supposed, our parents) were sound asleep. (I'll never forget how proud I was when I was deemed old enough to be dropped off at Woolworth’s in Asbury Park to shop on my own, using the money I saved from my allowance by depositing fifty cents per week in a "Christmas Club.")

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My parents always hosted an Open House for all the neighbors (children and adults alike) on Christmas Eve. During the preceding week, we made dozens and dozens of cookies - including sugar cookies, which we decorated with red and green sugar, and Tollhouse cookies, made by following the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s package, which magically and consistently produced the Best. Ever. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Out came the two fruitcakes, dark and light, for one last splash of brandy. Just before the party my mother prepared two batches of eggnog, nonalcoholic for the kids and most definitely alcoholic for the adults. We donned our Christmas finery and were allowed to stay up late. Years later, one of the neighborhood girls told me she was so inspired by these parties that as an adult she has always given a Christmas Eve Open House of her own.

After all the guests had gone home, we put on our foot pajamas and snuggled up to listen to "The night before Christmas"; then it was off to bed with us so we wouldn't be too tired the next morning. Not a problem for me; I was almost always the first one up. But we still had to wait for our parents to get up before we were allowed to go down to the basement and start opening our gifts - which seemed like forever but was probably more like half an hour. We had made our Christmas lists and I usually got exactly what I'd requested, plus lots of other stuff. One year I asked for a Nancy Lee doll but stipulated that I wanted her wrapped so I could be surprised when I opened the package. This turned out to be a bad call because she didn’t come in a box, and her gorgeous red hair ended up with a bad case of "wrapping paper head" that never quite went away no matter what I did.

When I was around five, my father bought us an electric train. After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, he stayed up long into the night laying the track so that the train would disappear down a hallway and a couple of minutes later reappear through the dining room. That year he, not I, was the first one out of bed on Christmas day. The train was a big hit with all of us but no one was more excited than my dad. If you want to make an engineer happy, just give him a model train and a whole day with nothing else to do but play with it. 
No portrayal of Christmas in Shark River Hills, or any other holiday for that matter, would be complete without mentioning the firehouse on Brighton Avenue. The firehouse was more than just headquarters for the volunteer fire department, it was the beating heart of the community, serving as a meeting place for scout groups and other organizations and an event center for community parties and celebrations. My mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, even though my father was not a firefighter. Here is a photo of the Christmas party in 1953, at which 73 children were in attendance, including both my sisters (#27 and #57), my BFF Joyce (#36), and practically everyone else I knew (plus a few I didn’t). Where was I? I guess I must have been ill that evening; surely I didn’t have anywhere else to go! (For awhile, identifying the 73 children became a Facebook obsession among the SRH crowd, including a circulating excel file that ended up with about 3/4 of the names filled in.)
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By around Christmas there was usually plenty of snow on the ground, which meant the long, winding Riverside Drive hill would be cordoned off and sledding allowed. Wish I had a photo of that! Instead, I’m including a little home movie, taken by my dad, of my mom sledding down the driveway with me. Notice how my mother was dressed.
The end of the Christmas season was marked by an enormous bonfire at the edge of the Shark River, fueled by dozens of spent, dried-up Christmas trees. Both my sisters are in this photo, taken in 1951. (Where was I, I wonder?) On the right, in the background, you can see the mothers - again, barelegged, in skirts. Thanks to my sister Sherry for reminding me about this event. 
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THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

12/7/2016

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Today marks a grim milestone in American history - the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” as FDR famously referred to it in his call for a declaration of war. Early that morning, a Sunday, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or damaging 18 ships and destroying 188 aircraft. In all, 2,403 were killed - mostly service personnel but also including 68 civilians - and 1,178 wounded. Since the US was not at war, all the victims were noncombatants.
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Congress quickly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war. Four days later, unhappy about Japan’s unilateral, unannounced initiation of hostilities but realizing American participation in World War II was now inevitable, Germany and Italy declared war on the US, which immediately reciprocated. 

Although the US had kept a wary eye on developments in Europe (Asia not so much), until now it had maintained a staunch neutrality, its populace deeply divided on whether America should be involved in the war effort in any way. All that changed with Pearl Harbor. Within hours America was on a wartime footing. Soon films about military life and lovers separated by war would crowd out Citizen Caine and Dumbo in the movie theaters. Soon “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “I’ll be Home for Christmas” would dominate the airwaves, along with revivals of World War I hits like “Over There.” Soon deprivation and shortages of building materials and consumer goods would become the norm. Soon admonitions like “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Loose lips sink ships” would become part of our daily conversation.

Much has been made of the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Both were unexpected attacks on iconic homeland targets, both inflicted a shocking amount of damage, both resulted in thousands of casualties, and both brought a sudden reveille to those who thought the world outside our borders could simply be ignored. Both drew the US into many years of armed combat. Whether the long-term ramifications of 9/11 can possibly match the political, economic, sociological, and cultural dislocations that followed World War II - the decades-long dominance of the US on the world stage, the Cold War, the increasing pressure for gender and racial equality - remains to be seen. But the analogy is useful in giving those too young to remember Pearl Harbor at least a hint of its transformative effect on life in America.
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For both the men and women of the Camp Evans community, the impact of Pearl Harbor was, if anything, magnified by the circumstances in which they found themselves - that is, in a new, ad hoc community, with nothing in the way of roots or shared traditions; and with all the men suddenly on high alert, aware that if the Axis powers knew what was going on at Camp Evans it too could become a prime target.
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My father’s story was perhaps typical. His first job after graduating from the Cooper Union in 1936 with a shiny new degree in electrical engineering was as a “student engineer” for Pan American Airways, where his chief duty was painting antenna poles. After a series of “starter” jobs with gradually increasing responsibilities, he eventually landed in Washington DC in a Civil Service position in the Signal Corps, in which he advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000/year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600/year. As the new decade dawned, my father, finding his job too long on administrative duties and too short on research (in a word, he was bored), sought a more stimulating position, one that would draw more extensively on his hard-won electronics skills. He was just on the verge of accepting a job at the Bureau of Standards in Washington in early 1941 when the Signal Corps countered by offering a promotion to Associate Radio Engineer at their radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth in NJ. He jumped at the chance.

Much of what I know about this era of my father’s life was gleaned from an oral history interview I conducted with him in 1979. He told me his initial assignment was at Fort Hancock, “an isolated peninsula up near New York City; but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar [which the Army had only recently acquired].” To minimize his commute and allow him to ride his bike to work sometimes (they only had one car), my parents moved at around the same time from Long Branch, their first NJ home, to Shark River Hills. 

If my dad was looking for excitement, he almost certainly found more than he’d bargained for. My parents and their friends were of course keenly aware of the war in Europe - how could they not be, given my father’s line of work? - but it was someone else’s war, not theirs. Preoccupied with unpacking their boxes, adapting to their new life, thinking about having children (a question of when, not if), they were as oblivious as most other Americans were to the fact that war was about to lap up to our own shores, and even more surprisingly, at the hands not of Hitler but of the Japanese: “Pearl Harbor...was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world! - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic.”

My father added, “[It turned out] there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time - although there was some later.” I didn’t pursue this almost offhand observation at the time and neither did he. It now appears that U-boat attacks on shipping along the East Coast were more extensive than was ever officially revealed, and I can’t help wondering if my father knew more than he was letting on. 

Several workplace changes resulted almost immediately from the attack on Pearl Harbor. Security, already tight, was strengthened even further. My father's work took on a laser-like focus on the military applications of radar: “I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar [including the Army’s first moving target search radar].... I think some of it was very original.” Another dramatic change was in their work schedules: “Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week.” 
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When the Camp Evans wives were parachuted into the unfamiliar Jersey Shore culture, they found themselves quite isolated, their social circle largely defined by their husbands’ work ties. After the sky fell on December 7, 1941 and their husbands started spending more and more time at work, they clung to each other all the more tightly for solace and companionship.

My mother’s closest friend from that era was Mary Jane Evers, an outgoing woman with a wry sense of humor. (Decades later I named my black cat after her black cat, “Rasputin.”) Mary Jane had a way with words and for many years wrote an amusing column in the Asbury Park Press called “We Took to the Hills” that went well beyond the demands of the genre (which tended to focus on who had tea with whom or presided at the ladies’ auxiliary meeting). In 1996, when I asked her to contribute to a “collective memoir” on my mother, she responded with a charming, breezy essay, scrawled in longhand, portraying both the impact of Pearl Harbor and her evolving friendship with my mother.

Although she was still living in West Long Branch at the time of Pearl Harbor, she was obviously already very tuned into life in “the Hills” and the Evans Lab community: “You must remember we were all ‘strangers in a strange land,’ so to speak.  Our husbands had been assembled from all over to nurse the infant Radar labs and then the electronics labs.  None of us had family nearby; shortly after we met, the attack on Pearl Harbor [occurred]; we each had 4 gallons of gas a week for the family car, and meat and sugar rationing.  We lived in a summer development, in homes not equipped for year-round living, and about 3 macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.”

My mom and Mary Jane didn’t formally meet until sometime in 1944, when each of them had a toddler daughter and Mary Jane was pregnant with her second child. By late fall, Mary Jane was going through a very rough patch. Her new baby had recently died at the age of three months, and her husband Jim, who like my father had joined the Radar Division at Evans shortly before Pearl Harbor in 1941, was away on “travel duty.” Impulsively, my mother phoned and invited her to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Their friendship was cemented with that gesture.

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Mary Jane with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)
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Elsa with Cindy
Mary Jane was keenly aware of how unlikely, in many ways, their friendship was: “We were very different people and from different backgrounds, but I believe that being thrown together in need, we grew to respect each others’ views and to treat our children a bit differently [than we might otherwise have done].  She was very loving (almost doting with you!); I saw children as little beings who would grow, hopefully, into individuals I would like. I have certainly achieved that!” (To be honest, I have no idea what those differences might have been - from my child's-eye point of view, the two women were a perfectly matched pair of moms. Politics? Whatever the differences were, clearly they were apparent to Mary Jane and presumably to my mother as well.)

Aside from their children, the other perennial conversation topic was money, or more accurately, the lack of it. According to Mary Jane, the pay was not generous even by wartime standards: “Civil Service personnel were not among those getting raises in Congress. The general public, from what I have learned, figured they had had money all thru the Depression when everyone else was broke, so they could just wait.” 

“Budget problems were ever on our minds," she went on to say. "Your [parents] would have some ‘interesting’ discussions when the bills came in. My daughter Barbara vividly remembers hearing Elsa say, “There’s always too much month at the end of the money!” The women raided their kids’ piggy banks (we all had piggy banks, which were supposed to teach us to save our money), and as my mother commented to Mary Jane, “By the time I pay the children back, I’m broke again!” Elsa and Mary Jane bartered babysitting time by deliberately joining organizations with different meeting schedules: “She was in the AAUW and I was in the League of Women Voters; she was a member of the local Fire Auxiliary and I was a member of the Hospital Auxiliary.“ 

At the end of this litany, Mary Jane worried she might have left me with the impression that the lives of the Evans wives were all about “money-grubbing.” Of course, none of us was suffering from malnutrition or doing without the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. The point was that money was needed not only to provide the necessities of life but, in a world filled with bad news and uncertainty, to allow for the comfort of a few extras - “a spot left over for simple parties, cheap beer and soda and birthday cakes.” Making things come out right, making ends meet, making it possible to have birthday cakes as well as Spam - that was a job that fell to the women. It was part of their contribution to the war effort, and they took it seriously. 

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How did the children of the Camp Evans community fare during Pearl Harbor and its aftermath? I was born just over a year after Pearl Harbor and have only fleeting memories - if indeed they are authentic memories at all - of the War years. Many of the facts of wartime life were part of the air we breathed. Yes, we ate Spam for dinner. Yes, we observed blackouts and dim-outs to avoid bringing unwanted attention from the German U-boats to American supply ships. Yes, we shared in the American love affair with the radio and tracked the terrifying narratives it brought into our homes. Yes, a chronic state of low-level deprivation was a part of our daily existence.


But in some important respects we were sheltered. The men - whether they were in the military or, like my father, civilians employed by the military - were doing work deemed critical to the War effort and therefore spent the War years on the homefront. They may have left for work early in the morning and arrived home late at night, but at least they were there, not thousands of miles away like my father-in-law, who spent four years on the Italian front as an Army surgeon. Our uncles and cousins may have been in uniform overseas, but not our fathers. 
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Jim with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)
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King with Cindy
And perhaps partly for that reason, our moms were stay-at-home moms, quite unlike my stepmother Rose, a real life "Rosie the Riveter" who worked as a welder in a Grumman Aircraft plant on Long Island. Although to say the Camp Evans wives bore the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities would be an understatement - and without benefit of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose revolutionary book on child care wasn’t published until 1946 - at least “Just you wait till your father gets home” was not an empty threat. (Not that my own mother said that, ever, but I certainly knew children whose mothers did.)

So in a way we Camp Evans kids got the jump on the Fifties. At a time when other families were struggling to adjust and create a new normal, we were already there. The Baby Boom was already in progress. Sally, the oldest Evers child, was born on September 11, 1942 - 39 weeks to the day after Pearl Harbor. My mother suffered a miscarriage before I was born; otherwise my parents too would have had a “Pearl Harbor baby.” Perhaps that’s why, whatever arbitrary cutpoints the demographers adopt, I’ve always known in my heart of hearts that I’m a “Boomer.”

Our mothers also didn’t have to be hounded out of their jobs and back to domesticity, they’d been there all along. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, the resurgence of feminism rooted in the wartime increase of women in the workplace ever touched my mother. Much later she took a few education courses in the hopes of translating her college English major into a marketable skill, but by that time her health was starting to fail and her retooling scheme never got off the ground. Her ambition for her three daughters was that we should marry well, so that we too could have the privilege of staying home to care for our children. We all remember her saying, only half-jokingly, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Fortunately for us, in light of subsequent economic shifts that made the one-income family a luxury, as well as our own ambitions, we got quite a different message from our father, who presented his women colleagues as role models and urged us to take all the math and science we could cram into our schedules.
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My parents and their friends were part of what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation” - men and women born between 1901 and 1924, who came of age during the Depression and World War II, who shared a common core of values including honor, service, love of country and family, and personal responsibility, and who more than rose to the occasion when duty called. For better and for worse (don't forget the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent, or the abuse my pacifist uncle suffered as a Conscientious Objector during World War II), they shaped America as we know it today.

​As Brokaw observed, it was sometimes difficult to coax their stories from them because of their conviction that they weren’t doing anything special, just honoring their commitments and doing what they were supposed to do. In this context, I feel fortunate to have obtained, without really planning to do so, the two eyewitness accounts on which the above narrative largely rests. And a big shout out to Bill and Helen Evers for sharing their childhood family photos with me. For more about the Evers's and their friendship with the Stodolas, read my post dated February 27, 2016 and elsewhere in passing.
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ABOUT MY FATHER

10/31/2016

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Hallowe’en was always a happy holiday in our house because it was also my father’s birthday. Costumes, trick-or-treating, all that candy - plus cake, ice cream, and rousing choruses of “Happy Birthday to You!” What could be better?
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The following entry is adapted from a piece I wrote two years ago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth, October 31, 1914. The original article appears elsewhere on this website but I am reposting it here on his birthday for those readers who are only here for the blog, and because some things bear repeating. For my fellow lovers of vintage photos, I have added several of my dad and his family.
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PictureMy dad with his maternal grandparents. Chasing butterflies with his granddad was one of his few childhood memories.
It was hard to get my father to talk about his childhood. Even when I conducted an oral history interview with him, I had to probe repeatedly to elicit much in the way of detail. I think he was one of those people who truly don’t remember their childhoods in the same vivid detail as I do. Questions about where he came from were usually met with his stock response, “I’m a native of where I’m living now.” Still, though many of the puzzle pieces are missing, I think I have managed to learn a bit about his formative years.  

PicturePhoto of Beatrice King and Edwin Stodola, from a brochure showing them in performance.
Both his parents were artists. My grandfather was a classical pianist who studied with the American composer and pianist Henry Holden Huss and concertized for a living until the advent of the radio reduced the demand for live performance and he was reduced to supporting his family doing clerical work. My grandmother was a ​professional elocutionist and actress - diseuse is the technical term - who also painted and wrote poetry and plays. I picture their household as resembling the Alcotts’, with a succession of visits by artists and intellectuals. How surprised they must have been by their eldest son’s strong bent for math and science. But apparently they took it in their stride and encouraged him to follow his lights where they led him.

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Beatrice holding King, age 11 weeks.
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King, around age 4.

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Edwin with King and his younger brothers, Quentin and Sid, and their dog Sandy.
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Beatrice with King, Sid, and Quentin.
An early affinity deserving of special mention is amateur radio, which was encouraged by what hams call an "Elmer," a neighborhood hobbyist who taught him the ropes. At the time when he received his license - I guess he was around 12? - he was the youngest person ever to do so. Of course, records are made to be broken, and many younger children have since been licensed. ​
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Radio Club at Brooklyn Tech. I believe my dad 2nd from left (1st in the front row).
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My dad used this photo on his QSL card.
My father attended Brooklyn Technical High School and then the Cooper Union, an engineering and art school noted at the time for being highly selective and (importantly) tuition-free. He made many lifelong friendships during this era, both at school and among the Unitarians whose meetings he attended (in preference to the Episcopalian church to which his mother belonged). Even then he understood that friendships need nourishment if they are to last. I think particularly of his high school classmate Carl Dworak - of the efforts they made to get together with their wives and children and the fun they had carrying out amusing little science projects when they did. (Carl had four sons, including an acrobatic pair of twins who were kept in two playpens, one upended on top of the other. The twins never seemed to mind!)
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On July 22, 1939, he and my mother, Elsa Dahart, were married by Dr. A. Powell Davies, a distinguished member of the Unitarian pantheon, at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC. At the time he was working for the War Department assigning radio frequencies for Army facilities ("boring!"). Later, seeking a more research-oriented job, he accepted a position in signal detection and the development of radar at Fort Hancock in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and my parents relocated to the Jersey Shore town of Long Branch. After Pearl Harbor, when the country moved to a wartime footing, his work was transferred to the Evans Laboratory in Belmar and my parents moved to nearby Neptune.
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July 22, 1939: King and Elsa's wedding reception was hosted by their friends Kitty and Bill Anderson at their home in Alexandria VA. My dad's mother is at the left of the front row.
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King and Elsa - young marrieds.
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My mom knitting tiny garments as she and my dad await the arrival of their first child.
I was born in Neptune in February of 1943, the eldest of four children. I like to think my parents named me “Cynthia,” the Greek version of Diana, goddess of the moon, in a moment of prescience, though I have no idea whether that was so. Although we were not a physically demonstrative family, I always felt that I was valued and cherished. The nurturing environment, however, was probably more my mother’s doing. My father tended to relate to children as miniature adults. One of my cousins still remembers his showing me how to change a tire and explaining torque to me; I was four years old at the time.
        
In Neptune, we were part of the small year-round population of a summer beach resort community where a lot of homes stood empty all winter. Today it is all paved roads and marinas and lawns, but when I was little it was very rural - not agricultural, but mostly gravel roads where you could ride your bike and not pass any houses or see any people for long stretches. (I doubt a small child would be permitted to do that today, but - times have changed.) Yards were mostly sand and rock gardens; you couldn’t have a lawn unless you brought in loads of topsoil, which my parents and most of our neighbors never did. 
PictureOur bungalow on Pinewood Drive in Shark River Hills
Until I was 4 or 5 my parents rented a tiny house down near the Shark River from a couple who brought in a little extra income by vacating their home and residing in an apartment over their garage. We then moved to a very comfortable home on Pinewood Drive at the corner of Hampton Court that, though not large, was baronial compared with the little rental. It had screened-in porches front and back, where we slept on very hot nights, and where we played with cards and jacks and pickup sticks and ouija boards (remember ouija boards?) all summer; and a floor plan that allowed our electric trains to disappear into another room and circle around a wall before reappearing. Not sure who loved those trains the most, the children or their father!

I wish I could give a firsthand account of Project Diana, which my father always regarded as his proudest achievement; but although I have many clear memories from that era of my life, including the birth of my sister Leslie in 1945, the excitement surrounding the successful moon shot isn't one of them. The late David Mofenson, my earliest playmate and fellow Project Diana legacy (the Signal Lab families tended to socialize mainly with each other during those early years in Neptune), recalled these moments vividly, so perhaps this isn't the sort of thing little girls tend to hang onto; in any case, not this little girl. What I do remember is accompanying my mom to pick up my dad after work - we only had one car - and waiting outside those old Marconi Lab buildings for him to emerge. I suppose because what went on inside was top secret, we never went in. The first time I ever stepped inside those buildings was many decades later, after they were reclaimed by InfoAge, the wonderful brain child of a local history buff named Fred Carl. 
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(the Project Diana team: Harold D Webb, John H DeWitt Jr, Jacob Mofenson, Herbert P Kauffman, and E King Stodola)
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​In 1948, my father took a job with Reeves Instrument Corporation in New York City and began several years of commuting by rail (including a running bridge game on the way in and reading murder mysteries on the way home), punctuated by frequent business trips around the country. At that point he became a weekend father, leaving my mother to shoulder most of the burdens and pleasures of child-rearing. Still, he was very much present most weekends, and my Saturday morning memories of my dad are of the lower half of his body jutting out from under his car. (Brat that I was, I used to tell him if you looked long enough and hard enough, you could probably find something wrong with almost anything.) We never needed a plumber or electrician because he was an amazing Mr. Fixit who could take on just about any washing machine or toaster that dared to break. He also became an avid outboard motorboater during these years, an interest that persisted even after we left Neptune. We had a series of vessels with names consisting of the first two letters of each of his children's names - first CYLESH and later CYLESHRO.
       
In 1956, Reeves moved to Garden City, Long Island, and the commute from Neptune was no longer feasible. My dad considered changing jobs at that time, which also would have involved moves (to either California or Michigan), but in the end Reeves made the best offer. And so our Jersey Shore days drew to a close.  

After a little house-hunting, my parents realized they could get a better house by living further out on the island - meaning my father would once again be relegated to a 45-minute commute, this time by car. My mother thought most of Long Island was too flat and zeroed in on the town of Northport because it had hills. Our real estate agent spent a whole day ferrying us around and scoping us out before revealing that there was a house for sale at 118 Stanton Street, right next door to her own home. It was truly a wonderful house, with a bay window, a Dutch front door, knotty pine paneling, a beautiful tilework fireplace, bedrooms with special features (mine had an outdoor balcony and Leslie’s had a loft), and a huge green yard, a novelty for us. We all fell in love with it immediately. A bonus, especially for my dad, was an active Unitarian fellowship located just a few miles away in Huntington; it was the first time we'd ever lived closer than an hour's drive to the nearest Unitarian church. Another bonus was the opportunity to pilot the latest CYLESHRO across the 8-mile expanse of the Long Island Sound (usually including one of his typical drive-in, drive-out visits to friends in Connecticut - which turned into fly-in, fly-out visits after my mother died and he took up flying).

My parents’ relationship was amazingly harmonious, something enough others have commented on to convince me I’m not selectively forgetting unpleasant moments. I never remember hearing them argue, let alone raise their voices to one another. I tended to attribute this to submissiveness on my mother’s part, but having watched my father’s equally courteous behavior towards his second wife, Rose, whom he married three years after my mother’s death in 1965, I think it also speaks to his fundamentally gentlemanly nature, as well as to his proclivity for choosing gentle and forbearing women as his life partners.  
        
A running joke between my parents was my father’s nickname for my mother, Blondie—not because she was blonde (she wasn’t), but because they in some way identified with the comic strip characters Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead - Blondie handing Dagwood his briefcase and hurrying him into a catapult positioned to propel him out the front door in time to catch his bus; Dagwood constructing and wolfing down monster three-layered sandwiches with revolting combinations of ingredients; Dagwood providing endless exasperation-cum-amusement for the long-suffering ditzy-but-wise Blondie. (As I sit here remembering things like my father’s collection of dog ticks in a jar of kerosene, which he showed off like a trophy as it grew bigger over the course of the summer, I think maybe this metaphor wasn’t so far-fetched!  Dagwood could surely relate to that. But my mother, though long-suffering and wise, was never ditzy.  Still, that was part of the joke.)

Although both his wives were mild mannered and softspoken, my father always admired high-powered professional women immensely and counted many among his wide circle of friends. It was from him, much more than from my mother, that I received the message that women could do anything and be anything they chose. (My mom used to joke that it’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man – at least, I think she was joking!) He strongly urged me to take all the math and science I could cram into my schedule and made sure I enrolled in AP physics and AP calculus, something I’ve never regretted as it has opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to me.
       
My father's gadgeteering proclivities led to numerous patents - the most lucrative being an electronic thermostat, an updated version of which can still be found in most houses. The patent was infringed on by Honeywell, which reverse-engineered the product and marketed it on a scale beyond anything Reeves Instrument could have dreamed of. My father won a court case against Honeywell, resulting in a royalty stream that lasted for many years. He always said he had the best of both worlds with this arrangement and claimed it put me through college.

Sometime during the 1970s, my father’s career took a disastrous turn. Back in 1955, Reeves had merged with Dynamics Corporation of America. When the electronics industry fell into a deep slump, the merged operation pulled up stakes and moved to Florida in hopes of riding out the downturn by lowering expenses. It seemed to work, but not for long, and when DCA went bankrupt, it took Reeves down with it. First to be paid off were the stockholders and creditors, leaving precious little for the senior executives at Reeves, including my father, who lost their pensions. To eke out a living, he took a series of consulting jobs requiring him to live in seedy motels and tiny furnished flats all over the country, plus a more extended stint near Syracuse, New York - until he finally secured a job in Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon. All his years at Evans Lab had qualified him for a government pension, but the amount was based on his highest three years of salary, the famous federal high-3, and for him those years were 1946, 1947, and 1948. The Pentagon job enabled him to accumulate three more years, enough to provide an adequate retirement income. So his heroic efforts paid off, and in the end he landed on his feet. It wasn’t until I myself reached retirement age that I fully understood the gravity of his plight. But although he was perfectly capable of a good rant, I never heard him complain about the injustice of his situation at a time of life when he should be winding down rather than revving up.
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July 20, 1968: Rose and Dad are married on Long Island, in the presence of his four children, her three sons, two sons-in-law, and their first grandchild.
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Some things never change: Mr Fixit
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Some things never change: Not one but two pocket protectors
The last few years of my father’s life were blighted by Alzheimer’s Disease. Although it’s said that Alzheimer’s is harder on the caregiver than the victim, my father was well aware of his deficits for much of that time, and angry and frustrated by his declining abilities and failing memory. Fortunately his downward spiral was relatively rapid, about four years. By then he had enjoyed a long and mostly fulfilling career; he had lived to see his children reach adulthood and meet his grandchildren. My stepmother, his life companion of more than two decades, was still by his side. Although I devoutly wish we could have enjoyed his company into advanced old age, the arc of his life was by and large complete, and his death in April of 1992, at the age of 77, was actually a mercy and a release (in stunning contrast to my mother, felled in midflight at the peak of her powers). Even with advance directives, no one can speak for others when the moment actually arrives, but I doubt he would have wanted his sad deterioration to be further prolonged. Or so I hope.
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I could say so much more about my father – his love of language and his gregarious nature, both, I think, unusual in an engineer, especially in one who was in most respects the quintessential engineer. I could talk about his encouragement of dinnertime debates and his favorite saying, “It ain’t necessarily so.” I could carry on about his love of gadgets (passed on to at least two of his four children, my brother and me) and his famous misshapen suits, weighed down by the gadgets and papers and books he stuffed in his pockets. But I will leave those threads for others to pick up and just state for the record how lucky I feel to have had him for a father. 


Happy birthday, Daddy, love you to the moon and back!
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    CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

    I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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